Allen Dulles

Allen Dulles (7 April 1893-29 January 1969) was Director of the CIA from 26 February 1953 to 29 November 1961, succeeding Walter Bedell Smith and preceding John A. McCone. He was the younger brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.

Biography
Allen Dulles was born in Watertown, New York in 1893, the younger brother of John Foster Dulles. He entered the diplomatic service in 1916, and he served on the US delegation to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and became director of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1927, serving as its secretary from 1933 to 1944. He became an anti-fascist after witnessing Nazi Germany's treatment of Jews during the 1930s while conducting a legal business trip, and he succeeded in convincing the law firm to shut down its services in Germany. In 1938, he won the Republican primary for a US House of Representatives seat after denouncing isolationism and supporting internationalism, and he helped a number of Jews escape to the United States from Germany. When World War II broke out, he joined the OSS, serving for six months as Berlin station chief for six months after the war's end. In 1948, he served as an advisor to Thomas E. Dewey's presidential campaign, and he became Deputy CIA Director in 1951 and Director in 1953. He oversaw the 1953 Iranian coup d'etat, the U-2 spy aircraft program, the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'etat, and the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco, after which he was fired by John F. Kennedy. He later sat on the Warren Commission to investigate Kennedy's assassination, and he died in 1969.